11 Tips To Keep iOS 8 From Destroying Your Battery Life

While iOS 8 comes with plenty of advantages, upgrading to a new operating system is never without its drawbacks. Maybe battery life just ain't quite what you'd want it to be, but we've got some tips to squeeze the most out of that sucker and stay juiced all day long.

Many of the features on your iPhone are handy if you need/want them. If you don't, they're just eating away at that precious battery life behind the scenes, and give you exactly zero help for your trouble. So shut 'em down.

Identify problem apps

One of the handiest new tricks in iOS 8 is the ability to see what apps are using the most battery life. You can check on your own personal problem children by going to Settings>>General>>Usage>>Battery Usage where you can find a list of apps that are chewing up your battery life.

Where you go from here depends on the apps in questions. You can always try to stop using the app so much, but chances are there are other measures you can take as well, like turning off location polling or push notifications. We'll cover those a little later on, so just remember the apps that are topping this list and be sure to check back for new culprits whenever your battery life starts to sag.

Turn off parallax

Parallax is fun, but it's the definition of "extra." And maybe it even makes you dizzy. Who needs it? Not you. You can turn it off in accessibility settings, by going to Settings>>General>>Accessibility and setting Reduce Motion to on.

Turn off AirDrop/Bluetooth if you're not going to use it

AirDrop is great when you are AirDropping. The rest of the time it's just fidgeting in its seat, looking for another device to play with. Turning it off is easy, just swipe up your Control Center, and hit the toggle.

Stop searching for Wi-Fi

There's no need to have your phone searching for Wi-Fi when there's no trusted network in sight. You'll save yourself some trouble if you get in the habit of turning of Wi-Fi from the Control Center when you leave the house. Alternatively, you can go to Settings>>Wi-Fi and turn Ask to Join Networks to off. This way your phone will hop on Wi-Fi networks it knows, but won't look around for more without direct orders.

Disable location services (for apps that don't need it)

Google Maps needs to know where you are, yes. But Facebook? Hop over to Settings>>Privacy>>Location Services to get a full list of the apps that are asking about where you are. You can probably turn off about half, and cut down on a lot of GPS polling.

Turn off background app updates

Immediate app updates are rarely a huge deal, but having enough battery always is. Go to Settings>>iTunes & App Store and then scroll down. You'll see Updates under Automatic Downloads. Turn it off. Just don't forget to stop by the App Store and update manually now and then. While you are here you can also turn off automatic updates for music in order to prevent U2 albums from appearing on your phone now and in the future.

Turn off background app refreshing

The brutal downside of good multitasking is running things in the background (duh). But if you go to Settings>>General>>Background App Refresh, you can disable background-runnin' for the apps that aren't important. Or all of them if you want to go all the way.

Disable auto-brightness

Chances are, auto-brightness keeps you more well-lit than you need to be. You can shut it off and get your mood-lighting on by going to Settings>>Display & Brightness and flipping the toggle. While you're there, crank that backlight alllll the way down, or as far down as you can handle. If you step outside, that's what the Control Center is for.

Go on a push notification diet

Not every app needs to push its notifications; that stuff takes power. Go to Settings>>Notifications and scroll down to the Include section. Then go on a toggling spree.

Don't push; fetch

If your email isn't that important, or you have a couple of accounts, go turn the low-priority ones to Fetch instead of Push, which means your phone will go retrieve mail at set intervals instead of having it pushed to you every single time Uncle Harry or a spambot blasts you. This one is pretty dependent on how often you get emails and how crucial they are, so you'll have to feel it out, but you can set to fetch in Settings>>Mail, Contacts, Calendar>>Fetch New Data

Turn off 4G (if times are tough)

Disabling 4G is going to hurt a little but, but desperate times can call for desperate measures and LTE is a battery-burner. You can choke off the data-hose by going to Settings>>Cellular>>Enable LTE/Enable 4G

And treat your battery right in general

But even without all these tweaks, it pays to treat your lithium-ion battery right from the start, especially if you have a new gadget. Check out our tips and tricks that will work for any phone.

Oh yeah, great update. To have your phone not run out of battery extremely quickly, turn everything off. What a joke. It must be wonderful having the new iPhone. Don't put it in your pocket, it will bend, oops, wifi issues again and to make it last through the day, turn everything off, magical just magical.

I've had more than enough experience with iPhones, working in an iPhone-only warranty centre for a major Australian telco. Yeah, I'm probably more qualified than anyone in this site to make judgements on Apple devices.

Other phones brands have bent slightly also, it's more a fact of physics andhkbe manufacturers desire to go wafer thin (how much thinner does something need to be?) so why isolate one? Wifi wise I have zero issues and no dropped connectivity

Oh and as the first two OPs noted, battery life seems to have improved leaving this article a lil outta place..

@pepee63. Got to agree with you. This techno-fetish site celebrates and supports early adopters. When there are problems, the response ranges from "have patience" to "these things happen all the time." But seriously, there are two take-aways here:

1) Apple is no longer a magical company whose products "just work." They have entered Microsoft territory of continually putting out updates to fix things that should have been picked up in beta testing,

2) Maybe early adoption is a flawed strategy if you want consistent functionality of core affordances.

Tell me does any android phones revenue stream surpass that of McDonald's AND coca cola combined? iPhone does
There ain't to many products that can claim that nor have any statistic that comes close in showing overall popularity in a single product line

Maybe it has something to do with most Android phones not having a profit margin as big as Apples?
Come on, over a thousand dollars for a phone? Are you kidding me? That is ridiculous! but people being as careless as they are, still seem to spend that kind of money.
Even if it will be slowed down with future updates and o̶u̶t̶d̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶n̶e̶x̶t̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r is already outdated.

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